Category: Computing

All I.T. related rants/posts.

Asus, where is the B204 w/Linux?

Dear Asus (pron: “a-sue-s”, not “ace-us”, apparently),

I’ve been looking for a small set-top home media player running Linux, with an HDMI on board, capable of running 1080p video. Looking around I’m quite fond of the Eeebox B204, but I don’t want to pay for MS Windows. I like the Bluetooth for my remote keyboard/mouse/input, and the battery UPS is cute up until the point the battery has lost its ability to charge/discharge.

I wanted to email you, but your asus.com web site has telephone numbers only. Its been a long, long time for you to bring this product to market in the UK. You’re also reselling different models in different markets, and your branding of the models is somewhat confusing: the B204 is “better/higher spec” than the B206 that was released at the same time?

Having said that, the on-line retailers I am Google-Frugal-Shopping searching through all seem to list the product, but have zero stock. Are there supply line issues? Is the product recalled? Or is it selling really well? Where are the Linux versions (sans-Microsoft-tax)? And why is your UK channel selling these at a considerable mark-up compared to the US retail prices? Currency does fluctuate, but I’m sure that UK£ and US$ are not on parity…. yet.

Sincerely,
JEB

MySQL views versus tables

An annoyance: at work we’ve been using MySQL 5.0.x for a reasonably high volume service. We recently swapped a table we were using from MyISAM, to a view containing several normalised MyISAM tables. Despite having indexes to make the joins in the table efficient, it seems that a SQL query with a “NOT IN (x, y, z)” style WHERE clause performs so much worse than the non-normalised original MyISAM table. So while a view may look equivalent to the original table, it won’t perform the same for all queries.

EasyCAP 4 channel input USB Video Capture

Video capture card; a gotcha

Once again, life proves when it comes to commercial offerings, you get what you pay for.

I found a £13 (~US$20) USB device with 4 composite video inputs, and one audio input, called an EasyCAP 4 channel device, on Amazon. I was planning on streaming 4 video captures from it at some quality. The unit turned up very efficiently, and emblazoned across the stick is “4 CHUSB DVR”, and a neat little Win32 utility called Multiviewer 2.0, by Zhong Kai Ran.

Fire up the software and an impressive 4-screen display is shown, however, its not until you plug in a video camera to one input that you can see that the device rotates through each of the video inputs; it doesnt appear to be able to stream all four simultaneously. A pity. So, if you’re looking for a “poor man’s multi-camera CCTV”, this is a very good choice, but be aware that you’ll only get (configurable) number of seconds from each channel in sequence (or selectable) but not a live continuous stream of all four inputs.

At least, that’s my experience under MS Windows thus far. I haven’t yet thrown it at a Linux system yet to see if it detects the device and/or it works any differently, but I’d suspect not.

Either way, it’s a start at what I’m looking to do anyway, so I am not too disappointed.

Next up, a small PC to house it in that I can run my GStreamer video processing on… hmmm… I want an Asus Eee Box B204 with its cute built in HDMI… its flirting with me promising Full-HD 1080p, but I guess if/when I have a spare £300 to play with I may find its also a little short!

Debian 5.0 Lenny is out

As of around 23:00 UTC today, Debian GNU Linux 5.0 is kind-of out and about. The official web site isn’t updated yet, and final CD images are being generated now, but the symlink of stable has come to rest on Lenny; testing is now Squeeze, and dear old 4.0 Etch is oldstable. For those not aware, the code names are all characters from Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story.

Lenny runs on 11 different CPU architectures, including the standard i386 32-bit and its equivalent 64-bit (AMD64). It ships with kernel 2.6.26. It has MySQL 5.0.51a (which has interesting STATISTICS table in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA).

Some of the gotchas that may come up:

  • Kernel 2.4 is dropped
  • Firmware for various devices may have been split out into separate packages; example, on an HP BL460 blade system, you’ll need to install firmare-bnx2
  • Apache 1 has been dropped; use Apache 2

See this for a rough summary and the release news story for more.